Learning My Limits the Hard Way

Life was easier last night without puppies. And without a puppy sleeping in the crook of my arm, I slept all night, until Lizzie landed on my stomach at 6:30 a.m. Lizzie is not a respector of the gradual wake-up, and does not understand "go away, bitch, and let me sleep." There is no snooze alarm on her head.

I am generally a fairly amiable early morning waker, but occasionally I am just too deeply asleep to be pleasant. This was one of those mornings.

However, you do not say no to a Happy Dog who wants Breakfast Now! It's just easier to give in and get up and feed the damn dog.

Now, I don't really understand the need for me to Get Up immediately. Lizzie is the most annoying dog to feed in the world. From the moment she decides IT'S TIME until food is actually put in her bowl, she is unstoppable. If I'm working, she puts her paws on my shoulders over and over again. If I'm sleeping, she climbs into my lap and licks me awake. When I get up the leaping starts. Up-down-up-down-up-down, eyes bright, mouth grinning. It's Snoopy doing his Supperdance over again.

The excitement builds as I go into the kitchen, put the two bowls on the counter and fill them. I put her bowl down first and go to the other side of the room to put Sheila's down. Then Lizzie stands there. She won't eat. She watches Sheila eat. She doesn't start eating until Sheila finishes her own food and starts looking at Lizzie's. Then she marches to her bowl and growls. But she still doesn't eat.

Sometimes she actually finishes her meal; other times she walks away and lets Sheila have it. I do not understand the dog.

If you're not going to eat the friggin' breakfast, why can't I sleep an extra 15 minutes???

However. I digress.

Once I was finally awake, I did a body assessment and the muscles seemed to be better, but of course I still can't do the bending/stooping/turning movements. But I only had a couple of things to do and I would just take it easy again.

One thing I had to do was to go to the home of the guy I had just written a feature article about. The newspaper photographer had gone to rehearsal and taken pictures, but I wanted a photo of him and his wife and the photographers were all booked up, so my editor told me I could take the photo myself. I would just drive over, take the photo, drive downtown, drop the photo and the other photos he had given me off at the newspaper office, stop off at the supermarket to pick up a few things, come home and go back to taking it easy.

Then I found out that one of the most painful thing to do was get in the car. It involved getting the right leg in, getting the butt in, and then lifting the leg on the sore side. You don't realize how much your chest wall muscles play in the act of lifting your leg until your chest wall muscles hurt! Oooo...oooo...ouch!

But there was no way around it. I went and took the photo (and am DELIGHTED with how it turned out--just exactly the way I wanted it to.

Then I climbed back into the car again and went to the newspaper office and discovered something else it's hard to do with an aching side: parallel park. I'm generally pretty good at parallel parking, but I felt almost as if I was learning all over again.

Then there was the short flight of stairs. Not many, but each one a reminder that I needed to move in a more careful way. I dropped off the photos, basked again in the praise for the article I'd written while trying to balance a puppy on my lap the day before, and then gingerly made my way down the stairs and climbed back into the car again. (Funny to think of "climbing" into a Honda!)

Off to the grocery store to pick up a few things. A $111 handful of things. Rising food prices? Nahhhh. I got more than I anticipated because I didn't want to have to go shopping again for a few days. I was going to be content to just stay at home and give my side a chance to get much better.

By the time I climbed back into the car, I was actually starting to feel not well. That last leg up into the car made me break out in a cold sweat. Then I went home and, since Walt wasn't home, carried the groceries into the house.

It's really silly that such a simple injury could have such a huge effect, but I learned several years ago when I disconnected my shoulder what a difference having to move your body in a different than normal way made. You hurt in places you never hurt before, and it's bloody exhausting.

After I got the groceries put away, I took a nap (fortunately I woke up long before Lizzie thought that I needed to feed her, so I got a full nap in).

The thing about minor injuries is that the older you are, the longer it takes to recover, and the more you do, behaving like normal when you shouldn't, the longer it takes.

So on my schedule for the next two days is doing nothing that requires any use of the chest wall muscles. Maybe by Sunday, when I'm driving to my mother's for brunch, I'll be feeling much better.